Special Report: Marijuana in Colorado

When Fort Collins businessman Neil McCaffrey and his wife were in Poland at Easter, a South American man who fled Poland ahead of the Nazis asked where they were from.

“Fort Collins, Colorado,” McCaffrey responded.

The man knew Fort Collins “because it was the marijuana town and had watched a TV program about it,” McCaffrey said following last week’s vote to legalize pot in Colorado.

McCaffrey and others now worry Fort Collins and the rest of the state may become known as much for legalizing pot as it is for its soft winter powder, thus hurting local economic development efforts.

Following the election, the one-liners came fast and furious for late night comedians like Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno, even National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me.”

“I’m looking for the first commercials for marijuana and once it’s legal completely, like Miller Lite Pot,” Wait Wait host Peter Sagal said Saturday. “They’ll be like, it tastes great. What does? I don’t remember.”

Many in the economic development realm aren’t laughing.

“The process of selecting sites is a process of elimination,” said Ryan Schaefer, president of Chrisland, a Fort Collins commercial real estate and development company. “This makes the process easier (to go elsewhere) if companies are considering different states.”

Uncertainty rules over what legalization means for businesses since marijuana is illegal, opening up liability concerns that may be more than a company wants to deal with.

“Given the choice between Fort Collins and say, Austin (Texas), and all other things being relative, I could see them saying, ‘Why do we even need to take this risk?’ ” Schaefer said.

In the short term, Schaefer agrees the potential influx of pot shops could be a boon for some now-vacant commercial real estate, but in the long run, he said it could negatively impact corporate decisions. “Now, Fort Collins and Northern Colorado have a nice quality of life, great schools, low crime, low traffic, the positive influence of a couple universities and an educated population. I’m concerned this is kind of a black eye on the state and region and there may be people who feel similar who don’t want to raise their kids here.”

(Page 2 of 2)

The state already has a reputation for being a bunch of ski bums, Schaefer said. “When executives look at the state they take that into account to some degree. They wonder how many people will call in sick when we have a big powder day. This perpetuates that in a sense.”

Northern Colorado Economic Development Corp. CEO Walter Elish plans to survey site location colleagues around the country to see how legalization of pot may hamper perception of the state.

“We’re known as a great state to go skiing and things like that, which is fine, but when you throw in on top of it a state that welcomes the use of marijuana ... that could potentially have an impact we would not want,” he said.

The drought, High Park and Waldo Canyon wildfires and the Aurora shootings earlier this year, “put Colorado in the national news and not in a positive way.” He sees legalization of marijuana as another issue putting the state front and center for something less than positive. “Some might think it’s cute and funny ... but when you start putting all of it together and start looking at the total picture ... I don’t think it will be positive. But time will tell.”

If an increasing number of states follow Colorado and Washington’s lead and legalize pot, the concerns may be unfounded, he said.

Before pot shops start popping up, there are “so many steps to go through yet at the state and local levels to see what this looks like and how to manage it,” said Kelly Brough, president and CEO of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. The first step is finding out what the federal government will do.

Colorado has one of the most highly educated and hardest working work forces, Brough said, and the chamber wants to make sure “companies believe nothing has changed in terms of the value of that work force.”